When your job is to watch days and days of old home movies and family videos, you understand the comment of one of my staff after a really busy period: "I think if I see one more Christmas tree, shots of kids at the beach, or a family eating a large Thanksgiving meal, I'll throw up!" In the middle of this rush, a large order came in of 1940's footage shot in and around a family summer home that was a total show stopper for my staff. My guys all said, "Wow, look at this!" and we did. For me, it was a time warp -- return to a childhood era I knew, but for my young staff born 30 years after the footage was shot, it was completely fascinating too. What had this long forgotten uncle done right that so caught our eye, so interested us? Simple things, really, things that you and I can do with no great effort or planning.

Here you stand, camera in hand, with no story in mind. You don't know how the day is going to unfold, nor do you expect anything unusual to occur. You don't even know who your audience might be if you roll the camera, but you want to capture the moment, you want to play with your new toy. Where do you start? Here are some things to think about that may help.

Be selfish: assume that you will be the ultimate audience -- that you are trapped in a nursing home with hard floors and hard walls surrounded by strangers, lonely, and no longer interested in a world that is spinning away without you. What would you want to relive and enjoy?

Create an imaginary pen-pal on the other side of the world: imagine you are exchanging "this is my world" videos with that person -- someone you want to impress but whom you feel has no idea what everyday life in your world is like. Perhaps instead of a pen-pal on the other side of the world, you need to imagine that grandchildren 50 years from now will be watching and enjoying your footage -- they need to see more than this year's Christmas tree or a collage of unidentified faces all wedged together at the end of a table.

If traveling and touring about, consider being rebellious -- don't shoot a video that the travel industry would want to buy, don't try to outdo the shots on the picture postcards, don't come back with hours of footage of old churches and great overlooks. Instead, shoot the little things that are different: the tacky, the elegant, the ugly, the glamorous. Get kids at play, beggars on the sidewalk, strange trucks, painted front doors, signs that tell you that you are "going to hell . . ."

In other words, take great care in capturing what the trade calls "establishing shots" of a time and place. Get a picture of the neighborhood, the house, the rooms you know and live in. Capture shots of things that wear out and become obsolete: cars, telephones, stoves, TVs, clothes, shopping areas, airplanes, you name it.